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pinnithin-writes · 3 years

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Good Jokes

Chapter 19

Stars wheeled above Tommy’s head in constellations he didn’t recognize. His eyes slowly fell into focus, and they moved sluggishly as he tracked the dust motes swimming in front of his nose. The nausea was gone, replaced with a strange lightness in his limbs; an airy, detached feeling he wasn’t quite sure he enjoyed. When he raised his head to look around, his body responded several beats slower than he’d like.

So this was Xen. It… didn’t look like much. Tommy had been deposited on a hunk of floating rock in the middle of a nebulous void, clustered around other asteroids rotated and spun like tortoises. It was unnaturally small, he noted. There was no way the hordes of aliens that had flooded Black Mesa had originated here. Spatially speaking, it was impossible.

But Tommy had just lived through an entire week of the impossible, and his survival depended on suspension of disbelief. He watched the landmasses floating past as he flicked through his thoughts. The ground beneath him had a light, chalky texture. Tommy skimmed his palms across the surface in an attempt to ground himself.

He felt untethered in a dangerous way. Vulnerable and exposed and… something frighteningly new.

Mortal.

It was very likely he could die here, he realized. Die for real. Die and not come back. Die with real consequences. His heart was delayed in its reaction, thumping out an anxious rhythm that was too slow to be natural. He was stretched out like taffy here, and if he broke it would end him permanently. Tommy was suddenly very, very afraid.

He forced his limbs to move, pushing himself into a sitting position with an effort that was worrying. Dr. Coomer had made it through - he was dangling his legs contemplatively over the edge of the rock they were floating on - as had Gordon, who was casting a wide-eyed stare at their surroundings, too awed for words. Bubby was nowhere to be seen, but Tommy was too busy wrestling against the static in his body to spare the prototype much concern.

He couldn’t lose it here. Not now. His pulse was thin and rabbity and oh so mortal, but if Tommy started freaking out in this unreal and dangerous plane, he’d surely die.

In that moment, Gordon wheeled and caught Tommy’s gaze, giving him a brief pass for injury before fixing on his face. “This is fucking crazy,” he breathed. “I can’t believe this is real.”

Tommy swallowed and managed a weak nod. No, he would not be dying on this planet. Look around, he thought, figure it out, build a solid foundation on fact. He drew in a steadying breath.

There was - somehow - an atmosphere on Xen, which Tommy deduced from the lack of boiling in his eyeballs, as well as a decent amount of oxygen, evident from Gordon being able to speak without instantly suffocating. The guy really should have put the helmet of his suit on before entering the portal, he thought distractedly. Gordon didn’t seem to be experiencing the same slowness in his limbs as Tommy was, which was good. Better to have one barely capable teammate than an entire downed crew.

They were short a member, though. Tommy didn’t miss the worried trill in Coomer’s voice when he said, “I haven’t seen him since we… I - I don’t know.”

“Oh no,” Gordon muttered. He passed another narrowed glance around them. “Where’s Benrey?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? Where had the entity gone, exactly, now that he was no longer bound by the structural laws of Earth’s plane? A dark premonition told Tommy they would be playing on his turf while they were here on Xen. Best to tread lightly. Shouldn’t be too hard, considering the gravity level.

Gordon shaded his eyes against the glow of the nebulas around him. “Did you see that?” he murmured.

“See what, Gordon?” Coomer asked.

Tommy heard a sharp intake of breath, a shift of dry gravel as Gordon took a step back. “Whoa.”

He flicked his gaze up at what had alarmed the man, and sucked in a startled gasp of his own.

Benrey had ballooned to a grotesquely colossal size, hovering nearby with that same placid smile stretched across his mouth. Uneasy, Tommy scrambled to his feet, and immediately was forced to double over from the sudden rush of blood to his head. The entity’s eyes, two gelatinous circles of yellowed flypaper, rolled from Gordon to Tommy. His lip curled back to reveal his jagged grin, each individual tooth the length of a fully grown man.

“What?” Gordon harshed out in disbelief.

Dr. Coomer, wholly put off, only uttered a small, “oh.”

Head spinning, Tommy managed to stand to his full height and draw his rifle from his shoulder. He made the mistake of catching the entity’s gaze and rapidly looked away. Okay, no, yeah, the nausea was back.

Gordon held out a hand defensively. “Hey, man,” he began.

The force of Benrey’s voice shook the platform they stood on. “Yo.”

Gordon fought valiantly to remain calm, but Tommy could detect the panic running a cold undercurrent beneath his voice. “What’s up? You look a little - you look kinda… big, there.”

Benrey’s enormous shoulders rolled in a shrug. “I’ve been tellin’ you to go back. I dunno man, you’re not listening to me. It kinda hurts.”

“Why do you want us to go back? What is happening?” Gordon asked. His face quickly hardened from shock to indignation as his brain began piecing together the facts. “Hold on. Hold on. Hold on,” he growled. “I was fucking right. It’s you, man!”

Benrey’s lips, if possible, stretched thinner as his grin widened. “Yo, it’s me!” he affirmed, buffeting them with his breath. “What’s up?”

Tommy covered his mouth and nose with one hand while Gordon sliced his arm in a threatening arc. “Don’t come any closer. Stay at that distance,” he warned.

Benrey’s mile-wide smile didn’t waver. “What the hell, man?” he asked. “Why are you freaking out?

“Because this is insane!” Gordon barked. He tore his eyes away from the creature to cast a worried look at the boxer beside him. “Dr. Coomer, what do we do?”

A tense few seconds of silence passed. Coomer’s voice was quiet when he responded. “Gordon. I’m scared.”

Gordon pivoted anxiously to Tommy again, who had managed to aim his rifle at Benrey. “Tommy. Tommy,” he hissed.

He darted him a look. “Yeah?”

“Make a run for it, okay? I’m gonna distract him.”

Tommy frowned. Like hell he would. If Gordon thought Tommy would leave his side after everything they’ve already faced, the man was dumber than he thought. He gave a sharp shake of his head and Gordon turned away with a sigh.

The entity was still watching them with a predatory expectancy. Gordon made another attempt to act like it was normal to speak with a man so large his mouth was a cave. “Hey what’s y - ah, what’s your favorite - what’s your PlayStation 3 gamer, uh gamertag-” he fumbled, muttering under his breath. “Do they call it gamertag? I dunno. I dunno, man. What’s your na-”

Benrey’s grin fell into an amused smirk. “That’s private information,” he answered. “You shouldn’t be asking that.”

“...‘Kay,” Gordon responded flatly. He returned his attention to a despondent Coomer. “How do we get him out of here? I feel like if we move he’s gonna fuckin’ eat us, or something.”

That made the entity laugh, vibrating the asteroid they were standing on. “Wanna kiss?”

Gordon startled backwards. “No!”

He scrambled away just as Benrey drifted closer, taking a flying leap from one platform to the one adjacent in what was far too great a distance to be natural. Tommy watched Gordon skid with all his weight on one foot as he adjusted to the gravity, and once he was certain of a safe landing, he grabbed Dr. Coomer and they made the jump together.

Gordon was still shouting at Benrey as they touched down. “You can stay there. You can stay there. Over there-”

“Yo, come back,” came Benrey’s distant whine.

“No,” Gordon bit back, insistent.

Tommy helped Coomer to a steady standing position and brushed the dust off his lab coat. A pointless action, perhaps, considering how crusted it was already with dried blood and alien gore, but Tommy was more focused on the scientist’s hollow stare as he tapped his shoulder in a “you good?” manner.

Dr. Coomer met his eyes and gave a very slow nod. His grip on his weapon was shaking.

Benrey, further back, swam lazily through the stardust as he basked in Gordon’s attention. “Man, we used to be great friends,” he said.

Tommy scoffed. He’d heard this one before.

“We were never friends,” Gordon barked. “We were never friends. There was maybe-”

“Remember those days where we played - we were playin’ in the sand and in the mud, we played in the mud all the time? Great friends.”

Gordon looked to Tommy, who managed to roll his eyes. Being the size of the house didn’t change Benrey’s tendency to act like a complete ass, it seemed, though Tommy’s nerves were still alight with apprehension as the creature stared them all down.

“I don’t think - I have a - you are forging these memories, dude,” Gordon went on, backpedaling quickly as Benrey lurched closer. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”

God, he really looked awful at this size. Tommy’s instinct to keep an eye on the most immediate threat warred with the revulsion of seeing an almost-human with pores the size of mailboxes. He shook out his right hand, then his left, as if that could get rid of the crawling feeling on his skin. Benrey blinked, slow and wet, at the three of them.

“Hug?” he asked.

Gordon made a noise that could only be described as “fuck no” and booked it.

As they hopscotched across the levitating platforms, Tommy gradually gained his bearings, adjusting to the weightlessness and the loose grasp this plane held on the laws of matter. Feeling a bit more oriented (but not an iota safer), he was able to notice more detail in the architecture here. The spires that lanced into the milky starlight above were definitely otherworldly, but a few features in this plane were recognizable to Tommy, such as a support beam in the shape of a lava lamp, and… were these Pop Rocks under his shoes?

Another rock formation swam past and he leapt lightly across the gap. Gordon was connecting a dotted path toward the largest landmass in this nebulous thing that passed for a planet, putting as much distance between himself and the entity as possible.

“Okay. Okay,” He huffed. “So, I guess Bubby - we have to forget about him because we have more pressing matters on hand right now.”

Coomer deflated vizibly at this notion, but he said nothing. They kept moving.

Now that Tommy was looking for it, he caught a number of other items from Earth in this plane. Busted copies of old video games, value sized bags of sweets, and other assorted oddities dotted the landscape, fusing and unfusing with the skeletal architecture like Xen was some kind of extraplanar bowerbird nest. He blinked with disorientation as he struggled to track it all. These were all things Benrey liked, he concluded, and suspicion coiled in Tommy’s stomach. Perhaps he had underestimated how much influence the entity held over this plane. It was probably best not to discount how easily he could kill them all here.

Gordon was in the same vein of thinking. “We have to get away from whatever the hell Benrey is,” he warned them, before lamenting to himself, “Why, why, why, why? Why is this my life? Why does it have to be this way?”

Tommy wasn’t sure if Gordon intended for the others to hear him, so he only grimaced and shot the man a sympathetic look in response. The whites of his eyes were showing stark in that frightened, deerlike way. He was terrified, but still somehow holding it together.

“Is he gone?” Gordon asked, right as the entity loomed into view. “Oh god. Oh god. Hide from him!” he hissed, throwing out a frantic gesture. “Tommy, get out - get out of sight! Don’t let him see y-”

Tommy’s position didn’t seem to matter that much, as the entity kept his luminous gaze on Gordon exclusively. “I can see wherever you go, friend!” Benrey boomed. “I have scans of your feet as well!”

“I don’t want you to have those!” Gordon replied, vaulting over the edge of the structure onto a nearby rock formation. “And they told me you didn’t!”

“Stop right there, Mister Gordon Feetman.”

Benrey leaned in close as the platform swung past him. Gordon stood tall and fired on the creature with all he had, even while trembling in his boots, and Tommy loved him for his fearlessness.

The entity seemed content to play with his food for now, taking the gunfire without so much as a flinch while the platform circled away from him. As Gordon, panicked and gasping for air, slid out of range, Benrey turned his glistening smile on Tommy and Dr. Coomer. His chin and neck were honeycombed with bullet wounds, and blood slid slow and thick down into the collar of his uniform.

Benrey winked at Tommy. Tommy racked his rifle in response, though fear was furrowing bone-deep in his limbs. Getting killed by this guy in the ass end of space would be a pretty embarrassing way to die, all things considered.

His attention was ripped away by Gordon charging past them, arm raised to fire. Tommy wheeled and met the wave of peeper puppies skittering toward them. He took aim and shot them down one by one as they approached, reminding himself to be conscious of the weightlessness in his body and the pulse in his neck that could be stopped in a second. You’re mortal. You’re mortal. You can’t slip up here.

Through the pepper of gunfire, Tommy heard Gordon utter a bewildered, “Bubby! What?”

Coomer popped the last alien with a slug of lead and snapped his attention to Gordon. He was staring, puzzled, at a static point on the ceiling a few yards away. Tommy looked, too, blinking through spatial disorientation as a full-sized Hot Wheels car phased through the prototype’s body. Bubby dropped from the stalactite he was clinging to, stumbling to an unsteady landing on their level.

Coomer exhaled in audible relief at the sight of him.

Bubby adjusted his glasses and dusted himself off, as if that bizarre entrance had all been planned. “God dammit, I thought I was out of there.”

Gordon’s gun arm hung in limp confusion at his side. “What just happened? Did you just turn into a car?”

A beat of silence passed as asteroids skimmed around them like pontoons.

“Look,” Bubby muttered, tossing an awkward look at the vehicle over his head. “We all have secrets.”

As Dr. Coomer pulled the other scientist into a hug, Benrey leered around the corner, aiming his yellow, pointed smile at them. The four of them hurriedly clambered through one of the cracks in the chalky stone walls and out of the monster’s line of sight.

The odds and ends Tommy had been seeing were tangled up in a scattered nest inside. He stepped gingerly over knotted shoelaces, a broken plasma ball, and sixteen copies of FIFA 08 as he followed the others toward the glowing teleporter in the cavern’s center. It hummed lowly, spiderwebbed between pillars, far more organic than the portals Tommy was accustomed to.

“What are these?” Gordon breathed. “There’s way more to this than we knew, huh?”

“The alien landforms here are beautiful,” Coomer intoned sarcastically.

Tommy crunched over broken glass and bottlecaps as he circled the room. Had Benrey taken them… home? Was this his home? How long had he been collecting this stuff? Tommy was having difficulty reconciling the two vastly different environmental factors of this place, alien and terrestrial, while Gordon and Bubby debated the safety of the teleporter.

“Well, either you’re stranded in an alien world, or you’re sent somewhere safe, or you’re instantly killed by it,” Bubby reasoned flatly. “So, take your pick.”

In that moment, Benrey’s face squeezed between the rock like flesh through cheesecloth, and Gordon pulled Tommy by the wrist through the portal before they could vomit at the sight of it.

Chapter 18 <-----> Chapter 20

#ink #fanfiction #good jokes #part of my endeavor to relocate all my ao3 work #body horror #BIG BODY HORROR ON THIS ONE #violence #guns #hlvrai

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